


Wild Bodies

by andloawhatsit



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, F/M, Friendship/Love, Gen, Loneliness, Moving On, Nature Magic, Plants, Spring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 17:02:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10995180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andloawhatsit/pseuds/andloawhatsit
Summary: Having hexed her last mark, Natasha, erstwhile hedgewitch-for-hire, disappears into the woods, there to begin the balancing of her personal ledger after a seeming lifetime of curses, petty and otherwise, for pay. But the solitude of her strange and living cottage in-between worlds is soon disrupted, first by an unusual bird nursing wounds of their own, and then by a strange child, who appears from nowhere seeking a curse…





	Wild Bodies

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by ["I Want to Taste Me On Your Fingers"](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/293283) by pathulu. 



> Thank you to [pathulu](https://pathulu.tumblr.com) who created the very lovely, very captivating piece of art that inspired this story — and who offered ideas, images, and comments on the work-in-progress, all of which were helpful and encouraging. In addition to this art piece, pathulu inspired me with prompts for poisonous plants, Sam as a bird, and a woman who transforms her home into a jungle. From that ground, this story grew — one about spring and being kind and brave, even in the smallest ways. 
> 
> For information on plants and their properties, I drew from Deni Bown's book, "Herbal: The Essential Guide to Herbs for Living" and a reprint of John Hill's "The Family Herbal, 1812." However, because I took a fair amount of creative licence, I would not recommend using any plants for medicinal purposes as described in the story. ([For the Tumblr masterpost, click here.](https://andloawhatsit.tumblr.com/post/161072324980/having-hexed-her-last-mark-natasha-erstwhile))

**_Rose geranium: persistent perennial with attractive pink and lilac blossoms — hearty indoors or outdoors, potted or in beds — fresh or dried, blooms hung with greenery make for a pleasant and useful wreath, with properties useful in blessing a new or refreshed home — may be spelled or simply admired — strongest at the threshold_ **

When Natasha Romanoff left behind the city, its people and their problems, she went north to seek the wild from which she had been gone too long. Her car abandoned on the shoulder of the I-81 — unlocked, keys on the seat, she didn’t need it anymore — and her pack hoisted, she melted into the trees, felt her body slip like a sudden drop: _it_ was still there. While working a job some years before she had discovered a little split in the world — nearby, at the state line where borders weakened boundaries — and she had widened the crack to make herself a place there, tending her lovely, living cottage in a shaded clearing strewn with protection spells. Whether the cottage was insurance, _you can always come back here if things get really bad_ , or a promise to herself, _one day you’ll come back_ , she couldn’t say, but after too long in the shadows and kept apart from the earth, too long crafting curses for petty men and ambiguous causes, she intended to make herself a home.She belonged at the edges, felt safest there, and for some time now she’d made do with what that city offered — burrowed into the outer reaches of urban neighbourhoods, slept in airport terminals and at interstate truck stops, foraged in derelict buildings — but all that time the split she’d dug into, her mother’s old cottage... They had dug right back, called to her, and she was tired. She wanted to be where trees outnumbered people.

At the edge of the clearing, she leaned against a birch’s papery white trunk and undressed, abandoned blouse and skirt and stockings, panties, camisole — all that stood between her and the earth. The trees rustled cheekily, all attitude and flutter, but they were happy to see her, happy to welcome a returning witch. When she unpinned her hair, it fell sun-warmed down her back and she abandoned her clothes. _Let them be swallowed up, forgotten, let mice burrow in them, let birds nest in them_. She stepped forward to renounce Natalie Rushman, Natalia Roman, and everyone else, and whistled softly in greeting, smiling as the flowers and grasses rose up around her. Lying naked then in the bed they made for her, she slept…

* * *

_Lying naked then in the bed they made for her, she slept…_

* * *

 

… And woke refreshed, like she’d not been in years. She stretched, shivering on the edge of coldness, and felt the popping of her spine as she twisted, the stretch of her calf muscle, her pointed toes. The spell cast on the cottage had held up well: everything exactly as she’d left it, suspended like a dewdrop on spider silk, now slowly returned to life. The geraniums twitched and unfurled in their window boxes, the ivy crawled, the grasses flushed green, her spider sentries spun their webs along the eaves and shutters, and her chickens, loosed from their coop, pecked contentedly. The cottage itself stretched its own chicken-like legs, one for each corner, to walk its wobbly circuit around the clearing, while kudzu vines — the impertinent things, she’d have to have words with them — climbed the walls, seeking the peak of the roof and the sun’s nourishment. Liho sprung from an open window, yowling greetings with his orange tail in the air, and she rose from her flowerbed to stroke his head, his ears, his crooked, bar-fight whiskers. Here she would live undisturbed. Here she would be peaceful. 

The cottage paused a moment to allow her to climb in, then wobbled onward, and she found inside its contents undisturbed as well: two hammocks strung from the ceiling, the squat wood stove with Liho’s rag-rug and her rocking chair before it, the mushrooms that sprung up along the baseboards and the herbs that sprouted in canvas bags hung from the walls. Her mother’s old sunhat hung on a peg and the family herbal, a thick journal with a worn leather cover, lay on the table, open to the very last page Natasha had used: the rauwolfia spell that had put the cottage to sleep. She turned to a fresh page and pulled a pen from her pack. “Time to wake up,” she said aloud, and the cottage rumbled its happiness, chicken feet scratching in the dirt. 

 

**_Comfrey (_ boneset _or_ knitbone) _: leathery leaves and hanging purple blossoms — though the latter may appeal, use the root, preferably fresh — for poultices, mash leaves with hot water and wrap in cheesecloth, but use sparingly — spelled poultices may also be used to encourage temporary stability of form in those shifting or dream-walking_**

She spent that summer reacquainting herself with solitude, tending her walls and her outdoor garden beds for herbs and plants unlikely to appear in the surrounding woods: yarrow and witch hazel, borage and hawthorn. All manner of plants sprung up in the split where she’d re-staked her claim, no matter whether one would really be likely to find chicory, wild roses, or morels in northern New York, and she relished the intrigue, returning to the world only a handful of times for grain, flour, sugar, and the like. She preferred not to go, instead spelling a pocket of coolness, a makeshift root cellar, into one corner of the cottage and otherwise securing her supplies, including an outdoor stock of kindling and firewood. Winter, when it came, was slow and solemn — snow in blankets, clouds grey and lazy, the once chattery trees slumbering — but in her cottage Natasha was cozy and safe. She spun flax before the stove and wove at her table loom, walked in the day bundled in thick woollen scarves, watched the squirrels and the foxes and the magpies, tended her winter garden and nursed the perennials through their hibernation. It was serene, almost stupefying, but far from succumbing to boredom, she was each day delighted. No one wanted her — imagine! No one banging at her door, no missions, no spells, no debts. No disbelieving American military men, no tedious cycle of doubt, shock, fear, and grudging belief, ending invariably with Natasha’s spelled muddling of their memories. How had she fallen in with such people? How had she come to let them hold the reins to so much of her power? Give an inch, they’ll take a mile, her mother had said. As always, she had been right. 

***

Spring flowered in its turn and Natasha, mucking about cheerfully in the melt and mud of the clearing, spreading wet snow over the garden beds so that it might soak into the soil during the thaw, was subject to that which rarely caught her: surprise. Distracted by the bright yellow glimpse of the season’s first daffodil shoots, she yelped, startled, at the thud ofa heavy bundle tumbling from the sky to land at her feet in the mulched remains of the past autumn. But it was not a bundle — it was a bird, a falcon, by the length of its wings and the hook of its beak — and battered, filthy, exhausted, it lay with its breast heaving. Natasha crouched low and stretched out her hand to call on the strength of a nearby aspen, channelling that strength, not to mention the tree’s whispering calm, to nurse the little thing. When she moved to stroke its head, it hissed and snapped, albeit weakly. 

“Okay, I won’t touch,” she said. “But aren’t falcons meant to be in South America this time of year?”

It hissed and snapped again, still weak, its talons clenched, but because it was clearly more frightened than angry, she drew again from the aspen to gently warm the air around it, then lifted it on a cushion of air. She felt its strangeness then, even through the buffer of her magic: it was no ordinary bird. “Ah, all becomes clear,” she said softly, unsure whether he could understand her in his present state of exhaustion. “Although the question remains: however did you end up here?” He could not lift his head, but his feathered chest still rose and fell, at least. “Can you understand me at all?” Natasha disliked complications as much as she valued her solitude, but without her the shapechanger would die. She couldn’t leave him. 

His leg trembled. A yes?

“I’ll take care of you,” she said, deciding.

 

Back in the cottage, she shooed Liho away from the rag-rug before the stove and lowered the bird gently, then cleaned his wings with a linen handkerchief steeped in warm water and witch hazel. “You’ll need to change back,” she said, having moved away to kindle the fire.“I know you don’t want to, but you must, if you want to heal.”

He was silent, ignoring her, maybe, or else too weak to respond.

“Or perhaps…” She rubbed the back of her neck, thinking of the change that moved through the eyes of a human being once they had given up, that terrible emptiness. She had seen it often enough. Too often. “Perhaps you don’t want to heal. But you must.”

He made a noise of derisive protest, almost a squawk; Natasha was reminded of Liho at his most dismissive. The cat himself watched from the corner, paws folded beneath him, striped tail twitching, though he knew better than to interrupt her or to stalk her guest.

“Why must you, you ask?” She fed the stove with a split log, then fetched a clean blanket from the chest below her hammock. “I suppose I couldn’t say. I don’t know what’s happened to you, after all. But it’s spring, my friend. Please don’t end here, if you can help it.”

The falcon shuddered, stirred, shrieked — and a man lay suddenly before her, backlit by the low flames within the stove, his skin dark and his short hair dishevelled. He shivered. Natasha covered him with the blanket, both to warm him and to protect his privacy, then set to work on her next task: medicines. “This is a comfrey poultice,” she said, explaining as she mashed the leaves in a shallow clay bowl brimming with hot water. “You haven’t any broken bones, which is what it’s traditionally used for, they call it _knitbone_ , but I’ve worked it up to help you get settled back in your skin.”

He stirred, protesting. “No,” he said. “You can’t — you can’t take it, witch.” He tried to rise, but slumped instead, hissing in pain.

Natasha was stung, but put aside her hurt feelings in the face of his obvious fear, and set the bowl to one side. “So you can tell what I am? I assume that means you know what you are, which saves us two troublesome conversations.” She had worried he hadn’t known he could change shape — that his first transformation had come on him suddenly, the product of great emotions, fear, panic, or even exuberant joy — and she hadn’t relished explaining his abilities. “I’ve no wish to suppress or take your power, and I wish you’d lie down before you hurt yourself some more. The poultice isn’t spelled to last, only to settle you in this form overnight, help your healing. I won’t if you don’t want it, but I’m afraid you’ll shift again, unintentionally, and hurt yourself.” 

He shuddered; even sitting up on his elbows had taxed him, and he groaned as he moved, rubbing his eyes. “Okay,” he said; then after a pause, “thank you.” 

“I’ll need you to turn on your side. May I?” He nodded, and she helped him roll onto his stomach, then settled the poultice, cheesecloth and mash now cooled enough not to scald, across his shoulders. It soothed him; that much was obvious. Slowly, his muscles relaxed; his fists, clenched as talons, released; he straightened his hunched shoulders. He seemed afraid of shifting, of his power, and he was obviously in pain, though fortunate to bear only bruises. “Can you tell me what happened? Did…” She thought about his first, sudden fear. “Did someone try to take your power?”

He shook his head. “But I’ve always been careful,” he said, voice low. “Storm. Couldn’t fight it. Couldn’t stop…” He coughed. “I couldn’t save him. Where am I?”

“My name’s Natasha,” she said. “You’re in my cottage. In New York — the state, not the city.” She thought of her split, the crack in the world she’d widened, and what magic the shapechanger might hold to have slipped inside without even meaning to. Perhaps another power was disrupting the borders... Could nothing ever be simple? “Well, sort of. I found you in my clearing and carried you here.” 

“You understand…” He waved his hand, weakly still. “About me.”

“I’m a witch,” she said, drily. “I understand quite a bit.”

“My name’s Sam,” he said. He closed his eyes. When he fell asleep, a small object rolled outward from his loosened fist: a school ring of some sort. It was a man’s ring , square and heavy. Natasha set the trinket in a teacup to keep it from rolling away, or Liho from stealing it to play with, and left the cup at Sam’s side. She kept vigil in her rocking chair the rest of the night.

 

Sam was with the air force — “sort of pilot,” was all he would say, and drawn to that because of his secret abilities, his love for the sky — and he had been on his second tour — where, again, he wouldn’t say — when his partner Riley was shot down beside him. “That’s when I shifted,” he said, he and Natasha sitting over bowls of carrot soup. “I’ve always been good at keeping my forms straight, flying under the radar, you know? Playing it safe. I’d never lost control like that before, but I felt like I was up there just to watch, and I just…” In his panic, he had swooped low to rescue Riley’s school ring, knowing it to be precious and thinking of the man’s family, but at the sight of his friend’s body, the realization of his death, Sam had lost control of his magic. He remembered fragments of the days that followed, the storm he’d flown into, but nothing concrete until waking on Natasha’s floor. “So you see,” he said, with some self-deprecating wryness as he washed the bowls, dressed in loose, plain athletic wear that Natasha had spelled to fit him, “waking up in a witch’s walking house is not exactly the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me. It's nice not to have to hide.”

Natasha smiled in spite of herself. “Not a house,” she said. “A cottage. Just one room.”

“I like the sound of a cottage,” said Sam.

***

Natasha filled the feeder that hung outside her window and scattered the leftover grain as an offering to nourish the cottage itself. It moved like a ship on the ocean, rocking slowly up and down, but she was steady as a sailor. She wore a plain shift, clothing herself out of deference to her guest, but her hair swung thick and lose down her back, soft and smelling of green and living things, the woods, her plants, the pot of basil on the sill, and the scent of baking bread filled the air, her having set _lepyoshka_ , a flatbread, on a hot stone in the belly of the stove. While it baked, she folded a few eggs for scrambling. 

Time passed in sync with the world outside, neither faster nor slower, and in the weeks that had followed Sam’s unusual arrival, they had established a kind of pattern, one that tended more toward lethargy than action. He slept heavily, still healing, and neither paid much mind to the sun’s travels. They slept in Natasha’s hammocks when tired, woke when rested, walked when restless, ate when hungry. As time wore on, Sam tested his ability to change form, now a sparrow, now a chickadee, a solemn owl, and — on one memorable occasion — a rooster, in an attempt to befriend the chickens, who scattered in terror at the sight of a stranger. As needed, each washed and clothed themselves behind a dressing screen, and when they found themselves idle at the same time, they talked. By mutual agreement, they spoke little of what lay beyond the split, and neither made mention of the passage of time, nor when Sam might depart. Instead, she told him about the cottage, the spells she’d used and how she fed it on blessings and scraps. She told him of the split and how she’d widened it to disappear inside, and talked of her plants, vines and fungi and blossoms, perennials, annuals, herbs and shrubs and mosses. 

One day while she and Sam walked circuits around the clearing, Sam still building his strength, he drew close to a castorbean shrub, impressed by its vibrant red-green leaves and prickly yellow blossoms, not to mention its merry, mottled seeds, like little candies. 

“Careful, though,” she said. “Pretty to look at…”

Sam pulled back with his eyes widened in worry.

“…And fine to touch, don't worry — but just a few seeds could take a man down.”

“Deceptive,” said Sam, but still he stroked a velvety leaf. “Beautiful, though — look how lively it is.”

“That’s magic to me,” she said. “You put a seed in the ground, and look what happens.”

In his turn Sam told her of the things he’d seen while flying, the places he’d been, how it felt to swim through cloud, to move in formation, the incredible hollow-boned lightness.

 

It might then have been any summer morning, clear and bright, on the day that Natasha received another surprise: she got lost. Just after dawn she had slipped out alone, meaning to see how the trees were standing, and taken a deer-path, moderately well-tread, stepping lightly even in her heavy boots. But she stumbled over a tree root, and when she looked up, there were roots, mushrooms, stumps, webs — but no path. She’d not been worried, at first — had even felt the thrill of the woods’ wildness, pleasure that oak and birch and pine and spruce and aspen could always be counted on for mystery, with willows standing always as the disapproving older sibling — and she had walked on without fear. The morning sunlight was thin and the wind sharp, but she stepped briskly, even through the clinging branches and with the wind’s fingers pressing beneath her shawl. “Hello, hello, good morning,” she called, singing almost. When she returned to the cottage, she and Sam would drink coffee made from chicory and dandelion root, with Liho purring and twining round their ankles, chasing the loose threads that hung from her hem. She would make porridge and they would sit together.

Then clouds moved across the sun: the warmth across her shoulders disappeared, the wind picked more fiercely at her, and she shivered. It was dusky, suddenly, and the trees seemed to have aged. The wet-rot smell of new buds had gone, fallen branches and dead leaves crunched in the dry ground beneath her feet, and the trunks had bowed, hunched as if in pain. The air was sharp, but empty: she could smell nothing. That was the wrongness of it: she didn’t smell the new life of spring, or the death of the last season, mud and mulch and carrion. There was nothing, and she thrashed through the trees, stumbling, brambles clawing at her bare calves, burrs biting her ankles to burst forward from the woods’ edge like a drowning thing at the ocean’s surface…

…And she fell as though from the sky, landing face-down in the mud. Turning face-up. Great gulping breaths. Hauling herself to her feet. Smell like a slap in the face, and alien to her: metal and tar and the sun in her eyes. A semi-truck flew past her, roaring and belching exhaust, and another and another, an endless string stretching into the horizon. Standing in a few inches of ditchwater, looking out onto a highway when she’d hardly done more than leave her clearing in over a year, she might as well have landed on the surface of the moon. After a moment’s frozen fear, she stumbled back into the trees, trembling, groping for the split, nearly weeping when she slipped back inside to safety.

 

Even in the cottage, she could not dispel the fear that had hooked her heart at the road’s edge. The moments with Sam that she had so anticipated — hot cups in hand, other birds chirping in the morning, the sight of his gentle face — were soured. While Sam dressed unhurriedly behind the screen, Natasha shook their dishes out the window to feed the cottage. “Everything I’ve seen,” she said, “and when I look at you, I almost can’t believe it. You’re here, a man, and there, a bird. It’s…” The morning’s strange events disturbed her, disruptions she could not yet understand, but did not know how to share her thoughts. Her burdens were her own to keep; she never shared them. 

“Magical?” said Sam, emerging.

She snorted. “Cheeky.”

“Natasha?” He had tilted his head, and looked at her. Soft, but sharp. Piercing. 

“Yes?” Perhaps she could tell him, after all, about the strangeness. He might understand.

“Would you let me braid your hair?”

At the same time she said, “I went walking this morning, while you were sleeping, and took a path I’d never seen before. It led me out of the trees and onto the highway, all the big trucks rushing past.”

With bare toes, Sam nudged a low wooden step-stool away from the fireplace and toward Natasha, then looked up full of questioning. She nodded, crouched to settle on it, and he squeezed her shoulder, then gathered her hair in his warm, rough hands. 

He combed his fingers through her hair, careful not to pull or tangle, and set to work on a herringbone braid, left and right, left and right, under and over, over and under. When he drew up the hairs near the back of her neck, his fingers brushed her skin. “You say you got lost,” he said. “You? These are as good as your woods.”

“I don’t own anything,” she said, protesting.

“Figure of speech,” he said. “Will you tell me what happened?”

She closed her eyes and let him work, and throughout her retelling Sam continued his careful work, narrow strands tightly woven and travelling from the crown of Natasha’s head to the small of her back. He muddled the ends, then tied them with a bit of string and leaned forward to rest his forehead on her shoulder. His body was tense; her own felt how he held himself back, how he was afraid to let go. “You were frightened,” he said. 

She wanted to say that she had been, but also that it hardly mattered if she was frightened, not when he missed Riley so badly she herself could feel it in the bruised aura that flickered around him. He tried very hard to be the strongest, to take care of everyone else. Instead she simply said, “Stay.” Then, “Just for now. At least for the summer.” Her heart thumped and clattered, loud enough to hear, she was sure. “You’re right, I was afraid.” She swallowed, hard. “He meant so much to you.” Her thoughts were a tangle, but Sam held her, and she supported him as he rested against her.

After a time, they separated. She pulled her braid in front of her shoulder and stroked it. “Thank you,” she said. 

Sam straightened the hem of his shirt. “Should we be worried? The highway and all…” 

She shook her head. “I don’t know. It felt… odd to me, out of place, a disruption. But not bad, necessarily, even though I was scared. A new power. Perhaps its you, and we’re all out of sorts getting used to you.” She smiled to show herself partly joking. The idea that the woods were getting used to new magic was not implausible. “I was stung by nettles,” she said. “I don’t think nettles have ever stung me _in my life_. Can you bring me some leaves off the heartsease? It's over there, with the heart-shaped leaves and the pansy flowers.” That would sooth her stung skin, at least. She sighed, and thanked Sam when he brought the leaves, and again when he helped her prepare a poultice.

 

The next day, on the summer solstice, she refreshed the blessing on the cottage with a fresh geranium wreath hung on the door, and afterward both she and Sam napped in their hammocks. In that warm doze they might have stayed all day, but that her webs sounded, a twang of alarm against spider silk, her little sentries, and the cottage jerked. It rattled and shook, and dumped them both unceremoniously to the floor.

“What on earth…” Sam rubbed his elbow, wincing.

“We have,” said Natasha, standing and straightening her shift, “a visitor.” She opened the door, and while the cottage shivered and held itself in place, found a child standing at the edge of the clearing.

 

**_Yarrow: tough stems — looks a weed, with little top-blossoms — used in prophecy and divination — more humbly, crushed leaves may staunch a wound while a tisane may lower blood pressure — a bossy plant, but a pretty one loved by ladybugs_ **

The girl wore thong sandals and a light summer dress, and was barely into her teens, if Natasha had to guess. She stood back from the cottage, but was not afraid. Cautious, perhaps; sensible. With one hand, she shielded her eyes from the sun; with the other she waved. “Are you the hedgewitch?” she said. “I want to buy a curse.”

“No,” said Natasha, pulse echoing in her ears. She flicked her hand and up sprung brambles, circling the cottage, blocking the child’s path. Protecting her. How had a _child_ found her? Natasha slammed the door and stood a moment braced against the jamb. Sam stood at the table, finely chopping yarrow root and chicory, by the smell of it. Natasha set a pot of water to heating, and let the root smell, fresh and clean and heavy on her senses, anchor her. She took a deep breath, tired by the sudden exertion. Afraid of herself. 

“You’re out of the curse game?” He spoke casually. “Or just an off day?”

From the window she watched the brambles creep toward the house, seeking her, wanting to soothe her. She’d need to spend the rest of the day talking them down, and it would serve her right. She fidgeted with one that had crawled over the window frame, and a thorn pierced the meat of her thumb, a bright swell of blood and a stab of pain. She hissed; the cottage rumbled back; it didn’t like to hurt her, even if accidentally. “You know there’s a fair bit of red in my ledger,” she said, finally. “I don’t do that anymore.”

Sam’s beard had grown in rough and shadowed; he’d not had the time, nor Natasha suspected, the inclination, to tend it. Wild bodies were their own reward, as she well knew. “A person can do terrible things,” he said, “when they’re following orders.” Ten words, and he managed to put a lifetime behind them, his and hers both. He tipped the cutting board over the pot, stirred, and after a few minutes steeping, poured off two cupfuls. One for her and one for him. “Let’s go sit in the sun, shall we?” He stayed with her the rest of the afternoon, though sometimes circling the clearing as a chirping sparrow, while she coaxed the brambles into docility once more.

 

**_Mint: appropriate in all its variations (spearmint, water mind, peppermint) to sooth the stomach, whether of indigestion, menstrual cramping, emotional distress, or disgust; take in a tisane — peppermint oil may serve similarly, particularly muscles strained or overworked — useful in blessings to refresh or cleanse_ **

For breakfast the next day, she baked another round of flatbread, and served it with fried morels, eggs, and wild bitter greens. Sam had been wincing by the end of the day before, sloping to one side and holding his body fierce with tension, favouring his left leg. He brushed it off as nothing, just a muscle pulled in flight, but Natasha, who had seen his sleep disturbed by nightmares more than once, was not so easily convinced. After they cleared the dishes, she caught him by the elbow. “You’re not sleeping well.”

He hesitated, then shook his head.

“Wait here a moment?” He made no reply, so Natasha rose to put the kettle on and when it began to sing, she brewed him a strong cup of chamomile, sweetened with honeycomb. She pressed the mug into his hands, and when he bowed his head to breathe the fragrant steam, brushed her wrist across his hair, then tugged him gently backward, until he sat with her body knelt close behind him. The move was meant to sooth, but awkward, particularly with the hot drink, and she felt herself blush. 

“I’m still… coming back to myself,” said Sam, holding himself at the edge of her touch. Natasha didn’t move; she was safest at the edges. “I… dream.”

“Of Riley?”

“Of falling,” he said. “But yes, about Riley. Where I left him.”

Natasha kept silent, but worked the heels of her hands into his knotted shoulders, felt the muscles unlock. 

He moaned a little, slumped before her. 

“Oh, Sam,” she said. “What have you been carrying?” She wasn’t looking for an answer.

“I don’t carry anything when I’m shifted.” He wasn’t ready to give one.

“You saved his ring,” said Natasha.

“Yes,” said Sam, bitterness tangy in his voice, souring the gentle scent of blossoms and beeswax. “The ring I saved.”

“I’ve got some peppermint oil here,” she said. “Would you feel okay taking off your shirt?” He nodded and tugged it off, wincing as he did, and Natasha went again through the same motions, rubbing oil into his bare skin. He moaned again, shivering beneath her hands, wincing when she worked on a particularly insistent knot, but he let the oil cleanse him. She rubbed his lower back, his shoulders, the base of his neck, and he gave up his pain to the earth below. She held him close, warm against him, pressed her cheek to his, and the cottage stirred against the energy flowing through them, through it, and they lost their balance — and the moment.

But afterward, at least, he stood a little straighter, and some of his bruised aura had faded. 

Then, just as they had the day before, her webs rang in alert and the cottage began to shake. “ _Bozhe moi_ ,” she muttered, and stalked across the cottage to throw open the shutters. She stuck her head into the morning, and felt the cool breath of the wind and rain like tears on her cheeks. 

The girl was there again, in the same dress and sandals, though with an added shawl pulled tight around her shoulders. “I want to buy a curse.” Natasha could not see whether the brambles had scratched her. 

“Are you deaf?” Natasha was snappish. “I said no.” She didn’t call the brambles back, but instead flicked her wrist and set a wall of stinging nettles between herself and the intruder.

“She’s only a little girl, by the look of her, and you took me in,” said Sam, when Natasha had closed the shutters. “I’ll get the heartsease, shall I?”

“You didn’t ask for curses,” said Natasha. “I’m doing her a favour. And yes, please.” When she was certain the girl had gone, she tasked Sam with feeding the chickens and herself with soothing the confused nettles, work that once again took up much of the day. When night fell, she steeped Sam a tisane of mother of thyme to guard against nightmares and set herself to busywork at the table loom, illuminated by lantern-light. Sam, who liked to watch her work, sipped his tea quietly nearby. 

“You helped me,” he said, at last. “More than that, you saved me. Maybe you could help her. Without a curse, I mean.”

Natasha poured the dregs of the teapot out the window to feed the cottage and didn’t answer. Sam didn’t understand that she was nothing without curses. What could she offer a young woman?

 

**_Violet: deters deception, encourages truthfulness — violet syrup may be used as purgative(truth serum), but unpleasant — variations grow both wild and cultivated_ **

On the third day, the girl came again: before Natasha and Sam had lowered their breakfast dishes, her thin, high voice broke through the morning, overcoming the chatter of the birds and the trees’ whispers. “I want to buy a curse,” she said. “I can pay.”

“Persistent little thing, isn’t she?” Sam lifted one eyebrow, watching Natasha over the lip of his porridge bowl, held close to his face as he scraped out the last spoonfuls. 

“You’re not bothered by how she might have got here?”

He shrugged. “It’s a strange world. But she’s not afraid of you, and I think that’s wonderful.”

Natasha frowned. “Or she wants a curse more than she’s willing to give in to her fear. God knows how she even keeps find the place. I’ve set spells to deter —” She fell silent, suddenly. “ _Bozhe moi_ ,” she said, slipping back into the exclamations of her mother tongue twice in as many days. “What if it’s her? What if she’s the disruption?”

“The new magic, you mean?”

Natasha growled under her breath. “Isn’t that just what I need.” She sighed, donned the large sunhat, and went outside.

The girl almost retreated, an aborted half-step, but caught herself. “Hedgewitch,” she said, speaking clearly, “I want to buy a curse.” It seemed a practiced line. 

“And who,” said Natasha, all cool — if feigned — disinterest, “do you want to curse?”

“My father.”

Natasha closed her eyes. More curses, more blood, more pain. “Has he — _chyort_. Don’t move.” She scanned the clearing where her cottage sat until her eyes settled on what she sought: two wild violets, one for her and one for the girl.She plucked them. “Take this. Violet for truth, so we know where we stand.”

The girl obeyed, and the two faced each other.

“Are you in danger in your home?”

“He’s not violent, if that’s what you mean,” said the girl, scornful. “But I hate him. I came to pay for a curse, hedgewitch, not to answer questions. What would you do if he was?”

Natasha rolled the violet stem between her thumb and finger. “I’m going to tell you to go away and come back tomorrow. I wouldn’t do that if you were in danger.”

“What _would_ you do?”

“Something,” said Natasha, by that point in her life skilled in telling the truth without saying anything. She hummed. “I deliver neither miracles nor instantaneous gratification. I need to think; come back tomorrow.”

“I’ve been here every day this week,” said the girl, indignant.

“And if you mean it, you’ll be back tomorrow. Tell me, how did you find this place?”

“People talk,” said the girl, shifty, looking at the ground.

“People?”

“Some people.” She whispered something Natasha couldn’t catch.

“Speak up.”

“The trees,” said the girl, overly loud, looking at Natasha with wide eyes and daring her to laugh.

Natasha pinched the bridge of her nose. She had a witchling here, a young witchling with no idea of her potential, no mentor, and a possible mean streak. “I’m not surprised. Now, before you go, tell me why you want to curse him?”

The girl was startled by Natasha’s response and stared open-mouthed a moment before she gathered herself enough to say, “He’s a cheat. He’s got a… _whore_ in the city.” The word was not her own, heavy in her mouth and jarring in the air between them. Parroted from another’s anger and grief, no doubt, though her own anger was still near incandescent, the core of her. Yes, she was the one disrupting the woods, even if she didn’t know it.

Natasha rubbed her nose again. “Come back tomorrow.”

 

**_Mother of thyme: a simple tisane from the leaves of this thick bush may be used to treat nightmares, whether intermittent or chronic — spelled tisanes may aide in dream-walking, should the walker nurture an inborn ability (mother of thyme will not create ability) — dried leaves add a pleasant flavour to root vegetables_ **

When the girl had gone and night had fallen, she asked Sam for a favour, a large one: to watch her body while she want walking. He took to it as to any task she’d given him: considered carefully, asked sensible questions, didn’t over-commit. “You don’t have to,” she said. 

“What do you do when you’re alone?”

“Liho helps me.”

“Your cat?”

Liho yowled indignantly. Natasha said, “He’s very skilled.”

“I’m sure I can be of more use than the cat.”

“He’s never leapt on you once,” said Natasha, in Liho’s defence. 

“He _clicks_ when he looks at me,” said Sam, but he grinned as he said it. It was a pleasure to see him smile. “It reminds me,” he said, “of watching Riley’s back,” and shrugged, as though the admission embarrassed him. “I like that. Now, how should I call you back, if I need to?”

“Call me Natalia Alianovna,” she said. “That’s how my mother taught me to walk.” She managed to give Sam a little smile of her own. “Right here in this room. That’s why there’s two hammocks, I don’t know if you ever wondered."

Sam shook his head.

"We came from Russia, years ago now. She wanted a place that could be all our own, that couldn't be taken away. It took me a long time to find my own way back, my own split, after she'd gone."

“I'm sorry,” said Sam.

Natasha nodded her head in acknowledgment, then settled on the floor (“less distance to fall,” she said, only half-joking, remembering a few near-concussions when she was still a novice), drank the tisane she’d brewed and spelled, and when Sam lay her down, lifted from her flesh like an egg from its shell.

 

When that shelled self sat up, her cottage had fallen away and she drifted spectral through a town she almost recognized. It was any place, no place; it might have been any little bedroom town. One of the finer houses pulled her as a riptide might and she slipped inside, past the hedges and flowering shrubs that framed the front yard, past a wavering shimmer in the air, another split that Sharon must have found and exploited. Natasha was smoke through the slot. 

Mail heaped up around the door, stuffed into jars and baskets or piled in slumps around muddy boots, dropped scarves, orphaned mittens, and Natasha was surprised to find it was not just any bedroom town after all — the mail bore English postmarks. The girl had travelled a long way. Soiled newsprint, bits of paper, scraps of ribbon, bent nails and rusted screws; tarnished silverware and dusty china, crumpled linens. In a nearby sitting room, everything — door frames, chair arms, books and shelf tops, forgotten teacups, half-empty crates, rolled-up rugs — wore heavy coats of dust, and photographs printed in black and white sat solemn in ornate frames, yet slumped against the walls, waiting in stacks four or five deep. Books and papers mixed with clothes and crockery on every flat surface, periodicals and weeklies in crooked stacks. Laundry heaped in baskets, half-done, and a battered suitcase, unwheeled and with thick buckles, bulged by the door. Everything was waiting… Waiting for what?

A woman slept on a _chaise longue_ , curled like a seashell under a crocheted blanket, her body humming, her aura inflamed. 

Natasha crept through the rest of the house, resisting the twinge that told her she was an interloper, an intruder. Her nose twitched: a bitter, half-familiar smell that rose above the dust and fatigue. Two children — one of them the witchling girl — slept in one narrow bed; although a second bed lay alongside, it groaned with clutter, dresses and pants and socks, dolls and pencils and books. In the upstairs hall, a man slept slumped in an overstuffed chair. The largest bedroom was empty: the bed clothes were rumpled, slippers sat nearby, but the room carried a chill. It was a desperate, lonely placed, unused for some time and she was cold, her shelled self pulled every which way, and the bitter smell was strongest where she stood. The shrubs outside: rauwolfia, like that she’d used to suspend the cottage. Misused? More likely used unknowingly, feeding on the wild magic within the house, within the girl, and…

 

_Natalia Alianovna!_

 

She blinked and woke in her hammock, knitting herself back together, with Sam holding her hands between his.

“You scared me,” he said. “You were shaking and you shouted out. I’m sorry if I called you back too soon.”

“You didn’t,” she said, and squeezed his hand. “I was unexpectedly distracted, and it… unmoored me. I was drifting.”

“So I’m better than the cat, then?” He winked, almost managing to hide the tremor in his voice.

“At least as good as,” she said, and kissed his knuckles. Beneath his solid kindness, there lay a bleach-wash of fear, fear he’d had for her, the itch that crawled his skin. The experienced had unmoored him as well, and he yearned for the freedom of the sky. The sun was coming up, peeking through the window; she had been gone all night, and she felt in Sam’s body the urge to fly.He shrugged — waiting to see if she was alright, she realized — but she wanted him to fly regardless, to care for himself without restriction. “You look like you need to stretch your wings,” she said, putting aside thoughts of the house’s odd magic, its dull torpor. “Why don’t you go on?” She shrugged in turn. “I’ll be fine here.”

“You’re sure?”

She nodded. “I’ll sleep for a bit. Do me good.” While Sam undressed and neatly folded his clothes, she fixed herself a comfrey poultice, much like the one she had made for him on that first day, she shed her shift and lay on her belly before the stove, fumbling only a moment before Sam stepped in, brushed her hair to the side and spread the poultice across the back of her neck. He disappeared into the morning, then, and she let the spelled herbs solidify her as she lay on the rag-rug, cooling her feverish aura against the unyielding floor. Liho, purring, pressed his paw against her cheek, then settled himself beside her, her guardian. She took a deep breath. The air was different when she was alone, different in the dawn, different in the woods than in the city. Everything was different. And she had come here to be undisturbed…

She laughed at herself, then: when was anything ever the same as it had been before? Was everything not always changing, always disturbed? The clutter of the girl’s house had disordered her own spirit, but her own reordering brought a clarity she realized only then that she had lacked for some time: the desire to resist change, to hold back, to stand on the deck of a sinking ship rather than set foot in an uncertain lifeboat — all of that suppressed one’s ability to grow. Choked it out at the root. For wildness was not chaos: even the trees had room to breath, to grow, to change, or else they died, smothered or burned. Breathing in, breathing out, her body settled. When she felt better able to stand, she tended the plants, check their roots for rot and their leaves for mould. She wondered what she might do. _Maybe you could help her._

She had an idea. 

 

**_Bayberry: fussy and temperamental — used for curses or to encourage prosperity and wealth — requires a careful hand — likely to behave unexpectedly_ **

Sam was still gone flying when the girl returned as requested. This time, Natasha was ready for her, standing barefoot in the clearing in a clean shift, her wide-brimmed sunhat arranged just so. “Tell me again what you want this curse of yours to do.”

“Make him leave.”

“Has he hurt you?”

“You asked me that already. When he was gone, we were happy. Now he’s back, and all he wants is her, her, her. That other one. Mum and Dad, they think I can’t tell, but I can. They think I don’t know, but I do. So, hurt me? Yes. Sell me a curse, hedgewitch. I’ll pay whatever price you want.” 

“Never,” said Natasha, narrowing her eyes, “agree to deals before you’ve heard terms.”

“I want my curse,” said the girl, petulant.

The cottage growled, pausing nearby. By force of will, Natasha held her ground. She felt what the cottage did: wild magic stirring in the girl. She whistled, and a willow tree bent its weeping, shaggy branches into twin chairs while Natasha pushed her magic down into the ground, urging the soil and the grasses to lift her, until she stood tall above the child. “Did I promise you a curse?” 

To her relief, the girl quailed. “No…”

“No. So sit.”

She sat.

Natasha stepped down from her hill and sat as well. “I won’t curse your father.”

Another little explosion: “Then what good are you!”

“But I will,” said Natasha, carrying on as though the outburst had not occurred, “spell a blessing for you, if…” She had thought long and hard on a task for the child, some labour that would nurture and enhance the blessing, not work against it, and that would challenge her without deterring her. “If you feed my chickens, and when you go home, put fresh linens on your bed and your sister’s.”

The girl’s eyes widened. “How did you know that, how did you…” She frowned. “The trees say you turn into an owl at night, and hunt for rabbits and lost children.” She pushed, tested. “Have you been creeping through our garden, eating mice?”

“The birches are inveterate gossips and pranksters,” said Natasha, irritated, though she knew the forest had itself been disrupted by the girl. “Listen to the aspens. I can’t turn into a bird, nor any kind of animal. I am only myself.”

The girl frowned, not quite certain whether or not to believe her. “I wanted a curse,” she said, hesitant. 

“Curses,” said Natasha, “are far more likely to backfire.” 

“Backfire?”

“Just what its sounds like: fire back against you. Not very pleasant. Wouldn’t you rather have a blessing for yourself?”

“I’d rather have a blessing for my mother and a curse for him.”

“Wouldn’t you just,” said Natasha, amused in spite of herself. “Well, come inside… What’s your name?”

“Sharon.” 

“Come inside, Sharon.” The girl did as bid, and once there, Natasha brewed the blessing, bayberry and St. John’s wort, in a glass jar. “Open it tonight,” she said, “but not until you can see the moon in the sky.” She wrapped the jar in cloth and put it in a basket, then handed Sharon the grain bucket. “Feed my chickens, now, will you? And don’t forget: fresh linens, and keep them so, fresh ones every week, and open the jar over your pillow.” 

The girl nodded, eager. “Your cottage walks,” she said.

“You’re very observant,” said Natasha, gently teasing and rewarded with a little smile.

When Sharon had gone, an orange-breasted robin landed, and in a flash Sam stood before her. He had bits of leaf in hair, and willow pollen. He gained strength day by day, though he hadn’t tried the falcon's form again. Pleased, Natasha waved. “Were you watching me?”

“Just giving you space,” he said. “An artist needs room.”

 

Despite the way she’d criticized the birches, Natasha soon found herself in need of their rumours. Sharon had not returned, and Natasha alternately assumed the matter had gone well or that it had failed disastrously. As the second week drew to a close, Natasha — reluctant to go dream-walking again so soon after the last excursion — at last ate crow, and politely asked a birch at the edge of her clearing if it had heard anything. She needn’t have worried. It was happy to blather, and Sam — in the shape of a swallow — peeped cheerfully, a bird’s giggling, as the tree just about talked her ear off. Sharon’s father, the birch said, had won a job in the city, yes, _New York City_ , and was gone in a shot. Best thing that could have happened to him, and to his wife, and not to mention them little girls, the witchling especially. A real blessing. 

When Sam asked about their conversation, having first interpreted it largely by Natasha’s facial expressions, he asked, “Is that what it said, ‘a real blessing?’” He grinned. “Imagine that.”

“We’ll see,” said Natasha, holding her happiness in reserve. “Bayberry’s fussy.”

 

**_Lavender: blossoms may be consumed fresh or dried, or steeped in water — sachets and poultices encourage relaxation and reduce tension — may also serve as a balm for marital problems or disruptions between parents and children_ **

Her caution proved well-considered. Not long after the birches gossiped with her, Sharon re-appeared as furious as a two-legged earthquake, vibrating with fury that was this time directed not at her father but at Natasha. Even the trees cowered at the sight of her pushing her way into the clearing, and bent their branches away from the fracas.

Sam leaned over Natasha’s shoulder, watching the girl’s angry stomping. “You okay?” 

“It’s fine,” said Natasha. “You better go though. Just for a bit.” 

“If you need me, call me,” he said, and then a crow swooped past her shoulder and into the sky. 

“You, you,” said Sharon, sputtering, too angry even to notice Sam’s transformation, as Natasha moved to meet her in the centre of the clearing. “You — you _lied_.” She burst into tears and covered her face with her hands, but when Natasha tried to put her arm around the girl’s shoulders, the child shook her off. 

“Please,” said Natasha. “Please. You can berate me all you’d like, but please come inside.”

 

Inside Sharon remained inconsolable. She sobbed, curled up on the rag-rug too miserable to fight, with the cat pacing anxiously a few feet away. “He shouldn’t be so lucky, he shouldn’t get to be happy. Hedgewitch, you promised! I paid you. You promised, and he doesn’t deserve it!”

Natasha sat on the floor nearby, quiet while Sharon railed, quiet until she wept herself dry. Then she stood, and poured a bowlful of hot water from the kettle. She crumbled a sachet of dried lavender blossoms and when the water had cooled enough to allow her to carry the bowl bare-handed, and its steam rose fragrant and floral, she poured off a tisane for herself, then soaked a clean washcloth to sooth Sharon’s tear-blotched face.

“You promised,” said the girl, voice froggy.

“You know I never promised a curse,” said Natasha. “I gave you a blessing.” She refreshed the cloth, wrung it out, laid it warm and scented across the girl’s forehead. “I blessed you: he’s gone. You’re free of him, all of you.” She sighed. “Ah, but you wanted him to suffer.”

A flash of fury: “he deserved it! He _deserves_ it!”

“And you deserve never to think of him again.”

“You did this on purpose.”

“I blessed you on purpose, yes, and I’ll take responsibility for that,” said Natasha. “But did I know that’s how it would play itself out? No. I made _you_ a blessing, not him, and blessings work on people in ways no one can control, not even witches. It’s the same with curses, so better to roll the dice on good luck than bad, don’t you think?”

“She has children. They call him father — maybe he is! What am I supposed to be?”

Natasha stroked her hair. “Well, that isn’t their fault. Perhaps they’ll be horrid and suffer; perhaps they’ll be lovely, but suffer anyway. So many ugly things in the world. We should try not to add to them. Perhaps you can learn that from me, but more likely you’ll have to learn it like I did: on your own.”

“I changed the sheets like you asked. I did everything you asked.”

“And well you did. One can’t live in chaos forever.”

The girl snorted. “But you’re a hedgewitch! You’re wild. You opened up that split, like the one that I found, you opened up a whole other world, and…”

“Wild places aren’t chaotic places,” said Natasha. “Creatures interact, help one another, compete — live and die. Destruction can be as natural as birth: say, a forest fire or a volcanic eruption.”

“Do you mean violence is natural, or that nature is violent? Is he natural, leaving us?” The girl was scornful again, her derision palpable in the thorny aura Natasha sensed around her, but she also felt the fear beneath it.

“Well, he isn’t artificial, but I suppose that isn’t what you mean. You can’t ascribe human emotions to plants and animals, and you can influence others, Sharon, but you can’t control them. Did you know you’re a witch too?”

Sharon looked up, eyes wide.

“You found me,” said Natasha. “You say the trees told you where to find me, how to find me. Didn’t you wonder why? Anyhow, all this to say…” She drained her cup and swirled the leaves at the bottom: they said her aim was true. “It would not be inappropriate to bring order to your home, I think, nor out of character for me to want to help. The wild character of your household, and your wildness, your mother’s, your sister’s — it was being smothered in the dark. When I visited you, I smelled rauwolfia on the air — it’s a fine enough shrub, fancy gardeners like the look of it, but misused it’s a kind of sedative. Keeps you down. And now…”

“Now he’s gone.”

“That’s right. It’s no good doing things by halves, or hanging on by your fingernails. Sometimes we have to, to survive, but sometimes we have to stop.”

“My mother can’t. She’s waiting on nothing, wishing on nothing, she…”

“That happens, sometimes,” said Natasha. “I hope it will be better now, but you may have to be braver still, even though it isn’t fair. Is there someone else you can talk to, that you think would understand?”

“You.”

Natasha smiled, rueful. “Besides me.”

“My Aunt Peggy, maybe.” She yawned.

“Good, good. We have to be brave, Sharon — be born, leave the shell, break the cocoon. Do you see?” She realized with a start that she could easily have been talking about herself; Sam too, for that matter. Did Sam have to leave? Would she have to let him go?

Sharon turned away. "You really think the world's waiting for me?" Her voice was small.

"It doesn't need to be," said Natasha. "You can dive into it anyway."

 

Sharon soon fell asleep, her eyes swollen with crying, her mouth hanging open. Natasha tucked a pillow beneath her head and laid a blanket over her. 

 

**_Rosemary:like thyme, lovely on root vegetables — for use in gentle binding, as to reinforce friendships stretched across great distances, or to soothe unpleasant dreams — easily grown — fragrant and clean — useful also for purification rituals — a conserve made of fresh rosemary tops and sugar in a one-to-three ration sweetens all manner of sour situations_ **

By the time Sam returned that night, Sharon had woken, condescended to eat a bowl of porridge, and gone home, with an open invitation to return for study that Natasha hoped she’d accept. And although she knew with terrible certainty what Sam was about to say, she found herself still disbelieving, resisting… Hoping. Hoping for what? Waiting for what?

“The autumn’s coming on,” said Sam. He too was beating about the bush. “The leaves are changing.”

“Oh?” She had always prided herself on her honesty, her clarity; when had she become coy?

“Natasha, I don’t know how to thank you…”

She cut him off there. “You don’t have you. It’s a friendship: we helped each other.”

“The thing is…” He looked up from the floor and said, voice full of quiet wonder, “Look, I can do it.” He transformed, then — became a falcon again  — and his borrowed clothes fell into a cotton puddle on the cottage floor. 

 

Natasha asked him how he planned to explain to the air force that he had not only gone AWOL for four months, but spent those four months in the forest with a witch on another plane of reality, with no real explanation of how he’d done it.

“I have to go back,” he said. “Can’t stay lost in the woods forever. Can’t always play it safe.” 

“That’s not an answer.” But she could think of no argument to keep him that would not be a lie, and so she frowned and fussed, but brewed him a blessing before he went — ginger root and rain water, with carrot for clarity, rose hips, and frangipani oil for understanding. “To nudge them toward belief,” she said. She stirred the mixture with a wooden spoon, then blew the blessing to Sam with a kiss. “To smooth the way. Help them believe you.” After a moment she added with a sudden rush of feeling like a shoot bursting from the earth, “You’re tremendously courageous, you know.”

 

He refused Natasha’s offer of provisions on the grounds that he couldn’t carry them, but on the morning he left accepted directions to the split that would lead him back to the world and permitted her to tie Riley’s class ring to his leg. 

“You’ll take it home,” she said, and stroked the falcon’s head, remembering the day they’d met, his fearful snapping. “You’ll get there,” she said. “It’ll be okay.”

***

**_Basil: bright green leaves, oval and fragrant — makes an unusual tisane, but a useful one — most often used in cooking, but can be sweet — attracts friends when fresh_ **

Another winter gone by, another spring coming in. Natasha took a deep breath, the fresh air, the new growth. She watered the basil on the sill, pinched a few withered, last-season blossoms from the ivy that climbed the side of the house and through the window, and stepped lightly around a cloud of puffball mushrooms, stolid below their broad caps along the wall. The cottage crept in its slow, rocking circuit, and Natasha’s plants, who knew what they were about, breathed in the sun or the shade as it suited them. Over the stove, the wood of the cottage wall had darkened and morels clung to the dirt floor at the corners of the living wood as they might gather round the charred trunk of a burnt tree. She took a knife from the table, plucked one of the morels, and chopped it roughly before stirring into a clay bowl with a few shelled eggs, some basil leaves, a few peppery greens. Outside, birds at the feeder and a clattering: Sharon for her lessons, prompt as usual, Natasha supposed, since her spider sentries had not sounded the alarm. The girl reminded her of her own novice days, she and her mother beetling about the clearing. She smiled, turned back to the pan, and set the eggs to scrambling.

A hummingbird swooped in the open window, flitting from side to side. Natasha pulled the eggs from the heat so they wouldn’t burn, then opened the door to give the tiny bird clear passage. “Go on, little thing,” she said, gesturing. She’d have to start a nectar feeder if hummingbirds were going to start visiting.

Instead, it flitted around her head. Moving so quickly, it felt like a crown, a ring of light around her. She closed her eyes and felt its wings’ humming vibrations against her cheek. Then it was gone, and she opened her eyes to a rustling behind the screen in the corner where it had rested since Sam went away. Natasha put her hand to her mouth.

And he emerged, a blanket wrapped around his waist, knotted at the hip. “Do you know,” he said, speaking casually, so comfortable, as though he had always been there, only hidden beneath the horizon like the sun yet to rise, “what hummingbirds use to build their nests?”

She shook her head.

“Plant fibres, moss, leaves,” he said. “But bound together with spider silk.”

She crossed the cottage in a few long strides and put her arms around him, head against his chest. 

“The nests are very small. Easy to miss. Easily disrupted. But they’re there. It works for them.”

“Is that supposed to be a metaphor? Have you been saving that all year”

“Why not?” said Sam, and kissed her forehead. “I’m out, Natasha, you are looking at a retired vet, and I missed you.”

His line spent, she felt his hesitant caution, but he needn’t have worried. She held onto him, tightly, and didn’t need to say how she’d missed him; he knew, surely. Then she said so anyway, just to be sure. 


End file.
